Nvidia Corp cofounder Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) celebrated the new year with staff during his first trip to China in four years, a low-key tour that coincided with growing concerns about Beijing’s ability to get around US chip restrictions.
He visited Nvidia’s offices in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing earlier this month, a person familiar with the matter said.
Images and video of the 60-year-old donning colorful traditional Chinese garb and dancing with staff emerged online over the weekend.
Photo: screen grab from Phoenix Television
It was unclear if he had held formal meetings with other executives or officials, said the source, who asked not to be named discussing a private visit.
Huang embarked on his tour — first reported by state newspapers off of Chinese social media posts — as Nvidia’s artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators become pivotal in a tech race between Washington and Beijing.
Huang has warned that an escalation in sanctions designed to cut off the flow of AI training chips could drive Chinese firms to develop their own alternatives.
That could harm US tech leaders in the long run, he said.
The Nvidia cofounder name-checked Huawei Technologies Co (華為) — which last year alarmed Washington by including an advanced made-in-China processor in a smartphone — as a potential rival.
An Nvidia representative confirmed Huang had celebrated the upcoming Lunar New Year with staff, without elaborating.
Nvidia, which more than tripled its market value last year thanks largely to its pivotal role in AI development, is up another 20 percent this year as investors bet on its sector leadership. It has designed versions of its semiconductors for China that it says are compliant with successive rounds of US sanctions, as Washington watches closely.
Among the social media posts, one person describing himself as an Nvidia staffer shared an image of Huang handing over a raffled Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card. The CEO has since moved on to Taiwan for his fourth visit to the country in less than a year.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
An Indonesian animated movie is smashing regional box office records and could be set for wider success as it prepares to open beyond the Southeast Asian archipelago’s silver screens. Jumbo — a film based on the adventures of main character, Don, a large orphaned Indonesian boy facing bullying at school — last month became the highest-grossing Southeast Asian animated film, raking in more than US$8 million. Released at the end of March to coincide with the Eid holidays after the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the movie has hit 8 million ticket sales, the third-highest in Indonesian cinema history, Film
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer specializing in server chips, expects revenue to decline this year due to sagging demand for 5-nanometer artificial intelligence (AI) chips from a North America-based major customer, a company executive said yesterday. That would be the first contraction in revenue for Alchip as it has been enjoying strong revenue growth over the past few years, benefiting from cloud-service providers’ moves to reduce dependence on Nvidia Corp’s expensive AI chips by building their own AI accelerator by outsourcing chip design. The 5-nanometer chip was supposed to be a new growth engine as the lifecycle
RSS